Product Description
On July 1, 1896, Mahler wrote to Anna von Mildenburg: "I could roughly define the last time like this: "What God tells me". And precisely in that sense that God can finally be understood only as love". God is love: this is the final revelation, the ideal goal towards which the long Adagios path leads to having started from the tortuous one of the entire Symphony.
Recognized as an integral part of nature alongside wild flowers and forest animals, man learns his destiny through the feeling of death, which brings with it resignation and pain. But when the bells of the morning, animated by the singing of the children who accompany the soft angelic dialogue between St. Peter and Jesus with their Bimm-Bamm, the shadows of the night fade away and give back to the man the meaning of his life.
It is here that love "speaks"; suddenly the void turns to wealth and the despair into life: the certainty of the existence of love becomes something real in the world of men. The revelation of "heavenly joy" opens up a new cycle, a new existence, perhaps a new totality: only love can overcome pain and death.
We know that Mahler thought about concluding the Symphony with the representation of celestial life, but stopping on that very limit: the idea of a hope. From this point of no return the immense arch of the last movement begins, which instead returns to evoke, with gloomy drama, the restless specters of the night, where the burning desire and denial, doubt and faith, are stirred in renewed finally, reconnecting, as in an endless carousel, at the beginning.
The work is enveloped in refined contrapuntal writing, not unlike the Prelude at Act III of Die Meistersinger; but the Wagner that transpires more is of course that of Parsifal whose volitive leaps of rising 4th also structure the finale, destined, according to Mahlers own words, to symbolize "the summit, the highest level from which we can admire the world ".
This transcription is intended both for playing and/or to help with the study of the original orchestral score by Mahler. In order to not leave anything out, occasionally in some measures the music is written in 3 staffs, where the long bass notes in the lower staff must be left to reverberate under the rest of the music.
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